Melody in her Name
by Alex Foster
Summary: Around her four hundredth year of life, Claire Bennet decided to take up art. Implied femslash. References to character death. AU for around The Eclipse and after.


Title: Melody in her Name

Author: Alex Foster

Category: General

Feedback: Always appreciated.

Rating: PG

Summary: Around her four hundredth year of life, Claire Bennet decided to take up art. Implied femslash. References to character death. AU for around The Eclipse and after.

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by NBC. No money is being made and no infringement is intended.

Author's Notes: I admit I took some license with how fast marble is carved in this story, but I hope if any stone masons are reading this they will give me a little room on that one. The title comes from a twist on a Joni Mitchell song. Thank you very much for reading.

...

_I love thee with a passion put to use_

_In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith._

_I love thee with a love I seemed to lose_

_With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,_

_Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,_

_I shall but love thee better after death._

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861)

...

Around her four hundredth year of life, Claire Bennet decided to take up art.

It wasn't out of a deep-seated need to create or a sudden discovery of talent. She wanted, in the beginning, simply to pass the time. Learning different skills she turned to recreating those she'd known over so long of a life.

Keeping with her daily routine, Claire walked through the darkened house on her way to the small studio her family had built for her. Even though she was the only one here, she kept the lights off. Years of living in the same rooms had given her a perfect memory of the placement of every end table and chair.

This was Claire's favorite time of day. Peaceful silence covered the world and outside a fresh coat of dew blanketed the lawn. Savoring the feel of her bare feet sinking into the soft earth of the backyard, Claire continued without pause to the small studio.

It was early autumn and the clean air held a refreshing crispness. Through the thin fabric of her robe Claire could almost remember what cold felt like on her skin. Ignoring the almost sensation, she unlocked the studio's door and crossed the threshold.

Inside the one room building was a crowded mass of canvases stacked in the corner; a small pottery oven; racks along the walls filled with paints, jars overflowing with brushes of all sizes, and half finished sculptures. White throws covered the hardwood floor, stained with splatters of paint dating back decades.

Claire smiled ruefully as she remembered her misguided abstract phase. Then, still early in her attempt at teaching herself how to create, she thought by just giving into emotion and throwing paint at a canvas she could force up the memories she longed to be close to.

Now she understood a more gentle hand could also achieve that result.

Here Claire did turn the lights on, banishing the early morning darkness. She stood for a moment and let the familiar feel of her haven away from Petrelli family politics and their continued struggle in the world of _specials_.

It was an outdated term these days, she knew, but she still remembered a time when heroes and villains were unknown to the world and people with abilities were rare. Claire glanced down at her hands, skin smooth and flawless. She was over five hundred years old and could still pass for seventeen. Not all abilities were common, even now.

Pushing such thoughts away, Claire shrugged off her robe and threw it over the room's only chair. Clad in only soft pants and a t-shirt, goosebumps quickly covered her body. Her flesh still remembered cold even if she could no longer experience it.

She passed the brushes and paint tubes slowly, touching the shelves with her fingertips. No, not messy colors tonight. Those she saved for days she craved something less tactile. Today she wanted dirt under her fingernails and chalk in her nostrils.

At the far end of the room was a virgin piece of marble given to her as a gift by a great, great, great, great grandniece. Rising to Claire's shoulder it was a slightly irregular block with two jagged lines running down a side where the careless quarry workers had butchered it. Eggshell white with veins of rich blue cutting it, Claire had purposely saved it for a special project.

Tenderly touching the stone, feeling all the work that would be required to produce the shape she saw inside it, she decided that today was the perfect day.

Pulling open a drawer on her workstation, Claire began assembling her tools. Each had a familiar weight and balance in her small hand. Some she'd had custom made just for projects like this. All were old, very old. One by one she placed them carefully on the tabletop.

Chisels were first, over two dozen total, ranging in size from two of her fingers together all the way to the length of her forearm. Some had divots for specialty shaping, and others were perfectly smooth across the blade. Hammers came next, all lightweight and long handled. Picks, some tiny enough to be toys. Files, rasps, and pumice stones. Claire preferred hand drills over power tools. With them she could feel the stone bore away as the holes dug inside.

She would use all the tools, but the pumice and files were the most important. Brute force would shape any marble into a passable shape, but only the pumice powder and minute details given by files would set this apart and give it life.

Claire picked up the largest hammer and chisel and started her attack.

She always used the heavy tools in the beginning. They pulverized massive amounts of stone, trimming it down in places to only inches wide. They were hard and brutal in their efficacy; the inspiration for this piece would have liked them Claire thought.

The sound of metal against metal, of hard stone falling to the floor, rang out in her small studio. The reverberations of each stroke echoed up her arms and settled in her shoulders. She felt almost pain before the torn muscle and tissue healed and reknitted.

She assaulted the marble mercilessly. Huge chucks slid from the main body. Sharp ends sliced through her bare feet as she danced around the quickly forming sculpture. Chips stung her arms as they flew wide. White dust clouded the air and settled over her in a fine layer.

Claire's breath came faster and faster, she was lost in this now. She didn't look away from the stone as she worked—to her eyes she could see through the waste stone blocking the image she knew lay underneath.

Setting the heavy chisel aside, she reached back and felt around until her fingers came to a medium grade chisel with a sharp point.

She switched hammers too. Opting now for one with a smaller head and a pick that curved down just slightly. Claire let the chisel's point rest against the slope where the shoulders would emerge and began gently tapping.

There were two flaws running from the left ear to the left shoulder blade. She had to cut next to them, removing smaller bits around the veins so as not to ruin the entire left side. This was experience more than natural skill that informed her.

When she first took up the hobby her work was sloppy and amateurish. Years turned into decades however and her technique improved. First it was pottery, busts mostly. After that she turned her attention to oils and the feel of slick paint slathering against paper.

Each one of her memories had a different medium that felt the most comfortable. Peter was always abstract. His unique signature was always changing, taking on new colors and shapes on the canvas. Painting those memories always made her happy—centuries after his death and Peter could still show her fresh and exciting things.

Nathan lent himself well to busts. Solid, strong, and heavy. Always faithful and able to weather any change. When carving his features, Claire always paid close attention to his comforting eyes. As she covered the pieces in bronze she always felt protected and safe.

Other members of the Petrelli family—Angela, her paternal grandfather, the hundreds of descendants she watched come and go over the years, unable to have any of her own—were always in oils. Never abstract she always depicted them in realism. She gave them an aged feel, stoic and familiar. Family portraits against Victorian style backgrounds.

Her father took the most time to get right. Noah Bennet refused to live in the frame by himself. Even when she set out to just paint him, the image never felt right unless he was sideline to some other person or action. Watching silently in the background, unseen.

Once she painted him standing alone next to a shoreline, suit rumpled and stained with blood, and a smoking gun held confidently in one hand. Adding highlights to bring out the bright sunlight of the day, she realized with a start it was a picture of the day he shot Elle in the shoulder.

Elle was the last person she learned how to capture in art.

With her it was always sculpture. Her essence was born in violence and shaped with sharp knives and heavy blows. There was something in that idea that made Claire sad. It was true in so many ways. Of all the people Claire revisited—heroes and villains alike—she never painted Bob Bishop. Elle would have wanted her to, but Claire could not bear it. He was an artist in his own right, and Claire would never do him the service of getting inside his head.

Time lost meaning inside Claire's studio. She was only half-aware that the sun had risen and filled the room with golden light. Streams of light from the windows cut beams through the powdery dust that floated throughout the sanctuary. Her dark bedclothes were white with it—dimly Claire wondered if she looked like the ghost she could never become.

Claire was deep inside her head now. She worked without stopping on the statue. When finished with a tool she simply dropped it and reached for another one. Files, chisels, and picks lay between the knee-high waste that littered the floor. Kicking the rubble out of her way, not caring when skin split or toes broke, Claire kept working.

Sweat dripped from her hair and turned the dust on her body to paste. Few things these days could make her feel alive and becoming lost in a project like this was one of them. Claire wanted this to be perfect—she wanted _her_ to be perfect.

There was no one left in the world that could remember the people Claire knew and loved. She could outlast photographs and had only her eidetic memory to make them live.

She had finished the base, leaving it as textured stone that twisted upward into a bare torso. It had raised arms; left hand extended and the right pulled back to the figure's ear. It looked as though she was drawing power from the air itself. Through it all Claire kept careful track of the veins of blue color that ran through the marble. They were the most important for the vision she wanted to create.

Claire examined the emerging flesh from the marble. She moved slowly around the statue, peering at every ridge and valley. Her fingers slipped around the torso and felt the rise of the backbone she carved for flaws. The statue was nude and even in its unfinished state radiated rebelliousness.

She smiled as she felt those aspects bleed into the stone and take hold. When people saw this piece she wanted them to see its model. Wanted them to feel what she felt for her.

It took hours to get the statue down to the final layer of marble but Claire was not ready to stop. Distantly she was aware of the fact she hadn't eaten or drank anything since coming to the studio. With other projects she was content to take her time and work for days on and off—but this she would finish without a break.

Choosing a fine file with a slight curvature, Claire moved up to the face. Again she cut with the utmost care. A slip of her wrist now could ruin the entire image. Moving the tool back and forth she began bringing out the shape of the lips.

Claire licked her lips in an unconscious response, and tasted grit and chalk. She ran her thumb over the warm stone with each stroke as though smoothing it with her touch alone. Using a chisel no wider than a fingernail she carved the small dimple just beneath the nose.

Claire was modeling this statue from when her subject was young and charged with energy. The skin would be completely wrinkle free and she would be as bright and young as the first time they met. Claire cupped the face as she focused on the eyes. Almost half a millennium melted away and she was again with her partner and fellow agent.

"I'm going to live forever you know…" she whispered the same words from so long ago.

It hadn't mattered at first, when they were both youthful. Years passed quickly for Claire and no matter how many times she healed she always came back in the same ageless body. It bothered them separately at different stages in their time together. Claire when she would notice new gray hairs or wrinkles across the dinner table. Her companion next when their appearances were too far apart for makeup to even close the gap.

On her fiftieth birthday, Claire decided the cares of their ongoing fight in the world—against both villains and the public—could wait a mere decade or three. It was something she suspected Adam Monroe came to understand in his equally long life.

She packed her companion and vanished with her from everything, from the war and the Petrelli and Bennet families. Outwardly she was still seventeen.

Using the edge of a rasp Claire carved the texture of lashes and eyebrows. Outside the studio windows the sunlight was starting to fade into the west. Again golden color filled the small room and this time caressed a familiar form encased in stone.

Finally happy with the angle of the cheekbones, Claire turned her attention to the arms. Gripping a fine file she let her fingertips trace the contour of the wrist and length of the forearm. She cut and smoothed in the definition of underlying muscle and veins. Claire didn't need a model for this either—her memory was vivid enough of the real thing to recall every inch.

It was slow painstaking work. She blinked bloodshot and tired eyes, willing them to heal, and worked at times a mere breath from the statue's skin. Claire moved across the width of the piece. Almost tender in each touch now. This form was how she had first met the inspiration; created by brutal violence but later softened by affection.

She wasn't easy to understand—and many of their contemporaries never knew her the way Claire had—but there was warmth at the center of her madness.

In the years after Claire came back to the fight there were other lovers of course, but none quite like that first one. None that helped her understand just how she would live when others did not.

Claire flipped the light switch back on and kept working.

Using a small hand drill Claire opened the navel and used a file to shape it into a perfect human replica. Scraping her thumbnail along the raised ridges of the nipples she removed excess debris. Standing on legs her mind told her should feel sore, Claire studied the eyes again and searched them for that special light…emotion captured, that told her somewhere inside was a bit of the spirit Claire carried with her.

Next came the polishing.

The pumice stones followed the rivers and roads left behind by the smoothing and shaping files and rasps. Slowly it removed the leftover cutting marks. Dampening the sculpture with a small touch of tap water, Claire began the final step using pumice powder and oxalic acid.

The marble took on a high glossy shine underneath her hands. It took hours, wetting the stone periodically, and moving up and down. Holding the polishing bag tightly between her fingers, Claire kept it in constant motion around the curvature of her old love. Her knuckles and fingers bent at odd angles at times but there was no pain and she did not stop.

Life slowly took hold in the piece. Vitality and power bled from its flesh like appearance. Those blue veins that lined the marble now stood out sharply in the hands, the torso, and the eyes. They were electric in their embellishment. It was as though energy itself lay frozen underneath the subject's skin.

Claire smiled as she finally took a step back to regard her finished piece. Rubble and scree filled her studio's floor. Expensive, antique tools lay scattered about. Blood marred many of the stones from where she had unknowingly cut herself. Outside it was deep into the night, almost dawn, and she understood for the first time just how long she had worked without pause.

The sculpture was perfect. Arms extended, head back, in a pose of one confident of her place in the world. Aliveness and insanity mixed together for an intriguing cocktail within her blue tinged eyes.

Claire decided she would return to the studio after some rest and clean the tools and remove the scrap. She excavated a tarp from a corner of the room and slipped it over the newly finished sculpture. Her fingers lingered for a moment longer over the face, touching the lips one last time.

"Goodnight, Elle."

**End  
**


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